The Hindu Business Line : Very iffy

A text message furiously doing the rounds at the 37th International Film Festival Of India (IFFI) pretty much summed up the mood: Amitabh in the Goan Deewar remake: "Mere pass gaadi hai, bangla hai, paisa hai, tumhaare pass kya hai?" Cecil replies: "Mera pass toh IFFI delegate ka hai." The fictional Cecil was right: an IFFI delegate pass for the 11-day festival, which closed last Sunday, was more valuable than a house or a car. Or love or money.

Nearly 7,000 passes for 2,000 seats, where the press and the delegates were left stranded over and over again, as friends and well-wishers of the local organisers of Goa grabbed most of the available spaces: this is what IFFI 2006 will be remembered as. The fact that the festival opened with Pedro Almodovar's Volver, and closed with Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu's Babel, both acclaimed films on the international festival circuit, and included such films as Sofia Coppola's much feted-but-deeply disappointing Marie Antoinette, and Larry Charles' outrageously hilarious Borat — a creditable feat for any non-first grade festival curator — will be forgotten.

Chaos is part and parcel of film festivals all over the world. But at no other fest will organisers tell you that the brochure (which lists the films and their provenance, a brief paragraph of what they are about and which festivals they have been shown at, sometimes the only indicators of the worth of the film, especially if it is not something that has received much press) will be available in a couple of days. No festival will be as clueless about the various arrangements, especially to people who are out-of-towners and need guidance at least for the first couple of days.

Chairman of the jury of the competition section, Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer, was cautious in his comments about the quality of the films and the festival, though he was clearly not overjoyed. But then he was a guest. Our own filmmakers were much more vocal. Jahnu Barua, a jury member, said outright that Goa was not ready to take on the mantle of India's international film festival, a one-stop destination which showcases the various `cinemas' of the country to delegates from all over the world, and that the people of Goa, as opposed to those in Kerala and West Bengal, did not really have a film culture.

Goa or not?

Three years on, a question mark hangs over the festival: Will it be Goa next year, or some other city? Conspiracy theorists abound: The babus from Delhi who are upset at the festival leaving the Capital are busy sabotaging the event, says one voice. The babus in Goa, recognising their colleagues' proclivity to fiercely guard their territory, feel there is too much interference, says another. The New Delhi based Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF), part of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry (I & B), should be closed down, and the `curating' of films should wholly be the responsibility of the Goan organisers, says yet another.

The result is altogether too much confusion. One nodal agency which is responsible for the running of the festival is the ideal: currently there are five agencies in the mix, two from Delhi, two Goan and one from Mumbai (an events management firm which organises the fringe activities and the concerts on the beach, and so on). And there is no one to take complete charge: anytime anything goes wrong, fingers are pointed in the other direction.

And then there is the other, more fundamental question: What is the IFFI for? What do film festivals accomplish? Are they only meant to provide photo-ops to movie-struck politicians and bureaucrats? The opening ceremony, as usual, was Bollywood heavy, with Bipasha Basu doing a rendition of her popular `beedi' song from Omkara, and wrapping with Salman Khan and Priyanka Chopra gyrating energetically on the makeshift stage, which was receiving a finishing coat of paint minutes before the curtains went up.

And through the festival, there was a steady stream of visitors from the Mumbai film industry (not Amitabh, not Shah Rukh, but who cares as long as they were from Bollywood), who got the maximum attention from the TV crews crawling over the venue in search of some excitement.

Star-struck

A UTV press conference, headed by producer Ronnie Screwvala, to showcase its new movie Metro presented its stars and the trailer an hour-and-a-half later than scheduled. The biggest star in that collection, which included Shiney Ahuja, Kangana Ranaut and director Anurag Basu, was the svelte Shilpa Shetty, who had the shutterbugs atwitter. The same day, at the `world premiere' of a Marathi film, the stars and the crew were not introduced by the organisers, and when a veteran Marathi actor from among the audience attempted to do so, he was rudely stopped. Filmmakers T.V. Chandran and Cheran accused the festival of having a `Bollywood bias', and ignoring their work: Chandran was still smarting at the slight handed out to him at an official party where he was refused entry because he was not carrying an invite.

This is a question bigger than the grievances of individual filmmakers: all over the world, commercially successful stars are the biggest draws at festivals and indie filmmakers have to fight for attention. A well-organised, well-curated IFFI can do both: get the stars in — and real big-ticket ones, not a series of second-rungers — to up the glamour quotient, and get the movies in, to keep the audiences happy.

On both counts, Goa has a long way to go.